Whiteness: An Ethnographic Question

Whiteness: An Ethnographic Question

Summary: Awardee will use an ethnographic lens to spark an interdisciplinary and intergenerational conversation on the role of whiteness in research, pedagogy, and institutional life.

Kaya Williams, a college fellow in the Department of Anthropology, will engage students enrolled in her seminar course on whiteness during the 2018-2019 academic year in a collaborative production of an ethnographically driven podcast. The goal is to use ethnography as a tool to spark conversation and to illuminate the multifaceted contexts out of which scholarly knowledge is produced through the combination of collaboration, convening, and audio content production.

Building off the energetic response to a recent collaborative ethnographic writing project on the role of whiteness in shaping the conditions of research and professionalism, the project team will create a two-pronged project with the goal of sparking additional inquiry within an explicitly intergenerational community of scholars. One aim is to start an interdisciplinary and intergenerational conversation on the role of whiteness in research, pedagogy, and institutional life via the podcast. A second aim involves hosting an event for the Harvard community focusing explicitly on the structure and culture of the university.